As fascist tendencies intensify across the United States, social movements continue to organize against the forces of state repression. Legal scholars must stand with these movements, grounding our analysis in struggle and supporting those fighting on the frontlines with our relative social power and institutional resources.

Some on the left dismiss anti-monopolism as a distraction from the core conflict between labor and capital. But this view misunderstands both history and strategy: antitrust has long been a tool for democratizing economic power, and it remains essential for resisting attempts to control economic production wherever and whenever it occurs.

In the ruins of the administrative state after Trump, many on the left see an opportunity to design a New Deal-type reconstruction agenda. But building state capacity requires a government that is seen as legitimate, and it is precisely the erosion of legitimacy in the eyes of the public that has enabled Trump to carry out his deconstructive agenda.

In the fall of 2023, the Department of Education launched more antisemitism investigations into colleges and universities than in all previous years combined. This record was surpassed in 2024 and is on track to be broken again in 2025. While the Biden administration wielded these investigations as a cudgel to crush student-led protests in support of Palestine, Trump has turned them into a battering ram in his attempt to remake American higher education.

Antitrust law is important not only for its potential in reforming our current economic system, but also analytically, because of law’s irreducible role in structuring economic competition and coordination. Contra any picture of markets operating via quasi-automatic mechanisms, the organization and operations of any market are as much a product of contingent rules as any law of nature.

How should we understand the relationship between Marxism and antitrust? To what extent do these traditions involve conflicting methods and assumptions? And, despite their differences, can we imagine a constructive give and take, where the two intellectual programs nonetheless align into a useful division of labor?